The laptop has a healthy variety of ports to make things easier for you. There is even a switch in the front, below the touchpad to physically enable/disable the wireless card. Also on the front you can find a media card reader that will read SD, MMC, and MS cards. On the lefthand side of the laptop there is a USB 2.0 port, ethernet port, and a hole for connecting a laptop lock. On the righthand side of the laptop there are audio ports for speakers and a microphone, two USB 2.0 ports, the DVD burner, and a VGA video out port. And finally, on the back of the case, you can find the power connection port, a modem port, as well as an S-Video out for outputting to your television. It does not have DVI though, which is usually only on very high end gaming laptops. Overall, it has pretty much all the ports you’d expect to use.

Next, I moved on to playing a DVD full screen to test out how long the Mercury’s battery could last under a mild load. Playing one of my favorite movies, Silent Hill, with the sound at full volume and the screen at 75% brightness, the battery powered for the entire movie as well as even more after restarting the movie. Overall, the battery lasted 2 hours and 48 minutes while playing the DVD. Once the battery was down to 1% I let it sit idle and plugged it into the wall to see how fast it would charge while still on. It took 2 hours and 10 minutes for the laptop to register a fully charged battery. One can assume it would take a slightly shorter amount of time to charge the battery had the laptop been shut off during the charge.

Now, I know a lot of people out there like numbers for comparison to other units available on the market. For convenience, I ran all the same tests on my desktop mini-ITX rig which actually uses a laptop CPU, the Intel Core Duo T2300 (1.6GHz). The other specs for my mini-ITX rig are 2GB of DDR2-667, 7200RPM 8MB cache Hard Drive and a nVidia 6800GT video card. Speaking of hardware, before we check out the rest of the benchmark results, let’s check out what the hardware look like under the hood of this machine. As you can see below, the three components that can be customized or upgraded are easily accesible via removable covers on the bottom of the laptop. I was surprised at how well built and reflective the CPU cooler is. It does a great job of cooling the CPU and rarely could I actually hear the fan running. Only during a couple tests did the fan fire up to full speed to achieve more of its cooling potential.

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on Wednesday, November 28th, 2007 at 2:55 am and is filed under Laptops/ Computers, Reviews Subpage.
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